Monday, 21 December 2015

Uncle Karl

A
Christmas story from 'Left Field'. "A
regular guest at our house was Karl Henrik Køster, a Danish
neurosurgeon who’d met my father in Bergen-Belsen when they were
both serving in the RAMC. They became close friends and my sisters
and I called him Uncle Karl. Because he always came to stay in
December, this large man with his deep voice and Nordic accent was
Father Christmas, though now I realise he looked more like Karl Marx.
Uncle Karl always arrived with a large bottle of Cherry Heering, a
Danish liqueur, and gifts for us children. I remember the
nine-inch-high brightly-painted wooden soldier with its red tunic and
blue trousers. It had moveable arms and a detachable lance which was
quickly lost. Karl Henrik was a surgeon at Copenhagen’s Bispebjerg
hospital. After operating on a wounded member of the Resistance,
medical students asked him to help hide 40 Jews while their escape by
boat to Sweden was organised. But how to get them into the hospital?
Karl Henrik organised a ‘funeral’ with dark cars, black clothes
and flowers. 140 turned up and all of them had to be hidden. He then
arranged for ambulances to take them to the coast. In all, he and his
hospital saved 2,000 Jews. Then their luck ran out. One day, when
leaving his apartment he passed the Gestapo on the stairs. They asked
him where Dr Køster could be found. As he left the building he
passed the body of a medical student shot in the back. He then
followed the same route as those he had helped save and escaped by
boat to Sweden. He made his way to the UK and joined the British
army. His wife Doris was at home and the Gestapo imprisoned her …
The last my
father
knew of Karl was when he heard from a mutual friend that he had, as
my father put it, ‘taken up with his secretary’. He had no idea
what happened to poor Doris. Karl committed suicide in the 1980s and
didn’t live to see the 1998 Disney film made about his life,
Miracle
at Midnight,
directed by Ken Cameron which starred Sam Waterson as Karl and Mia
Farrow as Doris. I recently came across words of his explaining why
he acted as he did. ‘It was the natural thing to do. I would have
helped any group of Danes being persecuted. The Germans picking on
the Jews made as much sense to me as picking on redheads.’ "